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There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe

Posted by timothy on from the never-outlives-the-ballot-box dept.

StartsWithABang writes: The heat death of the Universe is the idea that increasing entropy will eventually cause the Universe to arrive at a uniformly, maximally disordered state. Every piece of evidence we have points towards our unfortunate, inevitable trending towards that end, with every burning star, every gravitational merger, and even every breath we, ourselves, take. Yet even while we head towards this fate, it may be possible for intelligence in an artificial form to continue in the Universe for an extraordinarily long time: possibly for as long as a googol years, but not quite indefinitely. Eventually, it all must end.

7 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Well that's depressing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    But not really, because there's an unfathomable amount of time until this matters and humanity are some determined sons of bitches.

    Life finds a way?

    1. Re:Well that's depressing. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Black holes dissipate over time.

      Yes, but very slowly. A black hole of one solar mass would take about 2e67 years to evaporate through Hawking radiation. The time to evaporate goes up as the cube of the mass, and some black holes are 10 billion solar masses, so they would take more than 1e97 years to evaporate.

      Any current black hole with a mass larger than earth's moon would actually be growing, since the cosmic microwave background being absorbed is more than the Hawking radiation being emitted. They will not start to shrink until the universe cools off and the CMB dissipates, far in the future.

    2. Re:Well that's depressing. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      So then we have a long lasting energy source!

      Yes, very long. But a solar mass black hole would have a temperature of 60 nano-Kelvins, and would emit 1e-30 watts. If you used all the emitted energy from the black hole to charge a AA battery, many of the protons in the battery might decay before it is fully charged (assuming protons have a half-life of ~1e33 years, which has not been experimentally verified).

  2. Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Eventually, it all must end.

    Prove it. What's to say we don't figure out a way to harness cosmic expansion or the other 90% of the universe's energy in the vacuum and create a pocket dimension that traverses a Kerr black hole so that we wave to ourselves leaving before we enter the event horizon in an infinite loop?

    Prove (mem)Brane theory is wrong, and we don't discover that dark matter is simply the universe next-door some number of us will be able to hop to, perhaps by constructing duplicates in the neighboring universes, and thus propagating across the megaverse (or true universe, since the brane world would then be considered the universal encapsulation medium).

    For fuck's sake we haven't even figured out what happens at the event horizon of a black hole, let alone the singularity. For all we know every single galaxy has a super massive gateway to another universe at its center.

    I'm not saying that the heat death won't end all intelligent life in this universe, just that it might not.

    1. Re:Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". by onepoint · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I try every few years to "Feel" things differently :

      Last year was Ultra-Violet light, it was amazing that with a UV-flashlight a neighbors garden was weird and wonderful

      a few year back I hooked up headphones and tried listening to 30HZ sounds and below, could feel them but not hear them
      and it seemed to make me feel sick.

      I walk around with a blindfold a lot, makes me listen better

      I try writing with my left hand and use tools ... their is almost no tools make for left handed people

      this years test, I read somewhere that learning to discriminate time accurately is very hard to do.
      So I bought an egg timer, and I am going to learn what 5 minutes really is. kinda like that ST-TNG where data try's to boil water.

      --
      if you see me, smile and say hello.
  3. Big Rip by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I thought the top current working theory is that the expansion of space will eventually cause the Big Rip in roughly 25 Billion years from now. A slow "heat death" would be a step up from that.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  4. Conjecture by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 3, Interesting

    baryons would have decayed

    Actually that is conjecture as there is currently no evidence that protons decay. I'll grant that the expectation is that there are high energy processes which violate baryon number and if this is true then it should be possible for a proton to decay. However there is a simple way around this: suppose the initial conditions of the Big Bang just included a slight excess of baryons? No B violation is needed and protons are absolutely stable.

    As you can probably guess I'm a particle physicist and not a cosmologist. However even in the dark energy models presumably a 'big rip' condition is reached in the voids between gravitationally bound objects since there is nothing to stop the acceleration? If so then surely the implications for the stable pockets is not really known since all our understanding of causal disconnection is based on GR which would no longer be valid in the regions between the galaxies.